SANFORD — Fred Smith has taken on a big project — a nearly 200,000-square-foot project, in fact.

Smith, Sanford’s newest city councilor and the owner of JMS Cleaning, recently purchased the former Wasco Building on Pioneer Avenue.

Those familiar with the building are probably wondering why.

The building is a quarter-mile long and runs along Pioneer Avenue from Bodwell Street to Emery Street. Inside, for the most part, it is a vast open space interrupted by support beams with wires hanging from its high ceilings. Smith said a Wasco employee told him it cost the company more than $200,000 to heat it.

Smith said he bought the building because he was concerned about what would become of it if someone else did — someone like the person in North Carolina who wanted it for whatever he could salvage from it.

“I was afraid of who else was looking at it,” Smith said this week.

The building, a former textile mill, appears to be three different structures — two long brick buildings at either end connected by a wood structure between them. An inscription over the entrance to the brick office building at the Bodwell Street end says “Sanford Mills 1920.”

Wasco, an architectural skylight manufacturer, moved to Sanford in 1956 and was based in the Goodall-Sanford Mill building from 1969 until about two years ago, when the company moved to a newer building in Wells to increase the efficiency of its operations.

Smith had initially planned to purchase the building with two other partners, but when that deal fell through, he decided to go ahead on his own. He closed on the building at the end of December.

He plans to keep 50,000 square feet of the space and has spent the last few weeks moving his cleaning/salvage/recycling business to the building and making repairs.

After the purchase, Smith immediately started hearing from people interested in leasing or purchasing some of the space in the former mill. He has built a 30-by-50 foot space for a Biddeford company that will move in soon. A manufacturer in the area is interested in a 25,000-square-foot space, he said, and another company has expressed interest in a 6,000-square-foot space.

“We’ll be building these rooms to any size any customer might want,” Smith said as he proudly showed visitors the new space for his first tenant during a tour on Monday.

“That door wasn’t here last week,” Smith said, pointing to a large new garage door. He said several more garage doors will be installed in order to provide better access for business tenants.

Smith said he recently signed a purchase and sale agreement with Northland Enterprises, LLC, the company developing the former textile mill at 61 Washington St.

They are interested in 140,000 square feet of the structure, which includes the brick office building (near Bodwell Street) and the wood building. According to the agreement, Smith said, they would take down the wood section — salvaging the old beams and timber — and use the space for parking and/or green space. The office building would be renovated and turned into residential units. He said Northland is currently in the process of doing an assessment of the buildings and their potential.

There have been some setbacks, Smith admitted. Last week, when the weather turned unseasonably warm, some pipes that had apparently frozen began to leak. And he admitted that owning such a large building is “scary.”

On the other hand, he said, “It’s one of the smoothest transactions I’ve every done.”

“Everybody was helpful,” he said, “from the code enforcement officer to the fire marshal’s office.”

Smith said he’s planning to put any money he makes on the building back into it.

“I don’t want to keep one dime,” he said, adding that as long as he can keep money coming in, he’ll keep repairing and renovating the old mill.